oddhammer

It was a day I hoped would never happen, but I sat down this weekend and updated my little US national debt clock to display over $10,000,000,000,000. I say it's a sad day because despite what some people say (that the further in debt our country is the more prosperous we are) I find it hard to believe we're better off because of the debt we've just taken on. The whole concept of "money as debt" just seems corrupt. Then again, I'm not an expert on economics. Maybe having our national debt increasing at the rate of $36 per millisecond is a good thing.

The debt clock started when a friend e-mailed me a years ago and asked how to do a counter like a clock that starts at a specific point. He needed it in Flash so I whipped one together and sent it to him and then realized I could maybe do something worthwhile by putting it out there for people to use. I did.. and it hit myspace and facebook.. and I'm currently seeing about 65,000 views of it each month. I encouraged people to download it and install it on their own servers (it's not sucking too much bandwidth, but they shouldn't have to wait on my server for their page to finish loading..) so I'm not sure how many views it's getting that way.. I know it's being used on quite a few political web sites (both Republicans and Democrats running for Congress for example), in articles, and on some personal web sites.

I don't fuss with the accuracy of it since I figure if they can pull a number like $700,000,000,000 out of thin air just because it's "a really large number" then there's no point in trying to be too accurate on anything based on numbers provided by the same folks. I like to think that over the last few years I've helped a tiny bit to raise awareness of our out of control spending.. I can hope it's not too late to sort things out and maybe someday I'll be able to reverse the clock.

Some people don't like submitting bug reports about specific issues, but would rather just complain about general problems that bug the crap out of them. For those people there is the Dear Adobe site.

I don't particularly like the idea of smearing a company for no good reason, but if the people who are using the site have submitted bug tickets and feel like Adobe is ignoring them then I guess they have every right to complain.. or just use another product. That's part of how free market economics is supposed to work? If you find a better product then use it. And if the masses yell their complaints loud enough and the company is nimble enough then it'll fix the issues and keep the business.

Here's one I found: "please allow Flash's action window to stay visible when another app is in front, sometimes you need to compare code to something else." .. been an irritation for me for years and has been reported to Macromedia and Adobe many times. It's one of those "minor" issues that becomes major if you have to use the application a lot. I'm pretty sure I saw on one of the demos or heard through the grapevine that this has been changed in CS4.. so when you have the Actions panel open and switch over to another app the Actions panel remains visible. So maybe they did react and fix that. I'll keep my fingers crossed for code folding.

I have a movieclip on the stage with an onPress event handler and a mouse event listener applied to the movie.  It works just fine until I drop a TextArea component on the stage. 

I put this example together to show the problem:

When I drop the TextArea on the stage and the client types something in one of the TextAreas then the button events aren’t properly firing.  The example has several extra text fields on the stage, but the problem shows up even if it’s just the single TextArea and the button (and I trace the output).

Also.. if I comment out the mouse listener and have _only_ the myButton.onPress event handler then the button still doesn’t work all the time.  I just added the listener to show that the button is getting pressed and something is registering it.

Someone on Flashcoders noticed that the problem only occurs if you hold the mouse still and click repeatedly.  If you move the mouse and click then it works.

(update 5/15/04) - I should have noted that I don’t see this problem if I use myBtn.onMouseDown There was a reason why I couldn’t use onMouseDown and was trying to use onPress, but at the moment I can’t remember what the reason was. 

ok..  I noticed these discrepencies long ago and it never bothered me..  now I have a project that relies on the affected features and I thought I’d mention the little problems here… maybe there’s a workaround?? 

I can dynamically underline text through ActionScript at will, but there’s no way to underline it through the Flash MX04 IDE?  So I thought I’d be sneaky and write a quick JSAPI tool to allow me to underline text in the IDE..  and guess what?  No underline property for text there!  So I can use the textFormat .underline property in ActionScript, but there’s no way to underline in the IDE??  huh?

Another thing..  I can subscript and superscript text through the IDE, but the HTML tags <sub> and <sup> aren’t supported..  and theres not a .superscript or .subscript property for setting that textformat property via ActionScript ??  and from what I can tell there’s no way to use CSS to format text in Flash as subscript or superscript?